Murray, Hoy and Tbilisi. The Fitzrovia Partnership’s Facebook failure

By Angela Lovely

Andy Murray and Chris Hoy are English according to The Fitzrovia Partnership.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse on The Fitzrovia Partnership’s Facebook page. I think they are trying too hard. It’s not rocket science to run a Facebook page but the clueless Fitzrovia Partnership are making a real hash of it.

Yesterday they posted: “Good luck today Andy Murray, no pressure but there has been no Englishman in the final for 74 years.”

While the equally clueless Islington Chamber of Commerce “liked” the post (OK, maybe they were being ironic) a more awake Ashley Epps pointed out that Murray is actually Scottish.

Whatever clown is updating the page responded with: “We think that it’s safe to say, since the football finished for us it’s the closest we’re going to get for England until Sir Chris Hoy and Jessic Ennis take the stage.”

Ashley came back informing them: “Chris hoy is Scottish too. At least ms Ennis is English!”

So that’s 1 out of 3 they got correct. I’m minded to think that the geographically-challenged Fitzrovia Partnership would fail The Citizenship Test.

Now while I’m on the subject of the Partnerhip’s Facebook page and geography, I kept meaning to tell our readers about the goings on at the end of May. Perhaps now is an appropriate time to mention this…

For those of you that don’t already know, The Fitzrovia Partnership is proposing a business improvement district (BID) in Fitzrovia. There is currently a ballot taking place among the 232 businesses entitled to vote over whether to endorse the BID proposal.

Ahead of the pre-ballot papers being sent out by Camden at the beginning of June to the 232 business rate payers, it appears The Fitzrovia Partnership suddenly became very popular. Or so it seems.

Popular in Tbilisi? A sudden increase in “likes” then they all disappeared.

During the period from 29 to 30 May 2012 an additional 1,300 “likes” were given mostly coming from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Fitzrovia News discovered the unusual provenance of the “likes” after examining the public analytics of the page during early June. See screen shot above.

We queried this with The Fitzrovia Partnership who responded by saying that it was unimportant but that their “techie” people would look into it. We were unaware that managing a Facebook page required such high-level social media skills.

Fitzrovia News asked an expert in social media (as if we needed to?) to look at the Facebook page and offer an explanation. This digital guru declined to speculate on what was going on but advised us to contact Facebook with our concerns.

So we contacted Facebook.com and questioned why a business group with an interest in a small London neighbourhood should suddenly get a lot of “likes” appearing to originate from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

During mid-afternoon Friday 8 June the page disappeared only to reappear later in the day with 1,300 less likes than it had had in the morning. But the most popular city still remained Tbilisi in Georgia. Hence the strange-looking bell curve on their social analytics page.

You’d think The Fitzrovia Partnership would be concentrating on promoting a “yes” vote for the BID ballot on their Facebook page? But I’ve been scrolling up and down through it for the last couple of weeks and I can find no mention of a business improvement district. There’s plenty of comment and chit-chat about all sorts of things (and sport of course) but no information about what the company is actually up to.

Their Facebook page seems a failed attempt at, well… I’m not sure what. They certainly seem a bit shy about discussing this BID proposal. Perhaps it’s just an idle distraction for someone sitting in a basement in Fitzroy Street, or in a leafy avenue in Grantham? Maybe they spend a lot of time just twiddling their thumbs?

I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering why Camden Council have allowed these clowns to proposed a business improvement district. But perhaps Camden Council and The Fitzrovia Partnership make suitable bedfellows?